Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song. - book reviews

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Barry Wallenstein

Charles O. Hartman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 2D8 pp. $29.95.

Feinstein and Komunyakaa's The Jazz Poetry Anthology and Charles O. Hartman's Jazz Text provide such different pleasures that they defy comparison. The former is hefty, nearly 300 pages, but being a collection with verve and much originality, it is not heavy. Hartman's critical/analytical study is brief, barely 150 pages, yet for most readers, it is, as the jazzer would say, "heavy." The language, whether Hartman is speaking of poetry, jazz compositions, or popular songs, is technical, and redolent of contemporary theory. While the subjects might not be considered recondite, the treatment, for all its brilliance and learning, is just that. The obvious relationship between the two books, apart from the j-word, stems from the notion that Feinstein and Komunyakaa's anthology begs the question of what a jazz poem is, whereas Hartman's book goes some distance to discuss many aspects of the topic.

The Jazz Poetry Anthology offers a wide-ranging selection of what the editors call "jazz poetry." The term means many things to many people, and it's an open question as to what makes a jazz poem. For me, a poem that alludes to jazz figures is not the real thing unless it also demonstrates jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation. Many of the anthologized poems are simply about jazz figures or particular jazz performances; many others, however, try to imitate the music with their phrasing, idiom, and snaps of the demimonde. Despite the broad designation, this book, like the much slimmer and now out-of-print Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry (1981), is a loving tribute, through poetry, to jazz.

Various aficionados will inevitably lament the absence of some of their favorites. Carl Sandburg is included and recognized for his role in the early history of the engagement between the two arts, but Vachel Lindsay is not, and his role, it might be argued, is larger. Mina Loy is represented by "The Widow's Jazz," a nice curiosity, rather than a jazz poem, while her contemporary, Maxwell Bodenheim, is not. A number of poems in his Bringing Jazz! such as "Futuristic Jazz" or "Jazz Kaleidoscope" would be congenial in such a collection. There are two surprising omissions: Nikki Giovanni, a natural for this kind of book, and Allen Ginsberg, who has recorded with jazz (not that this is a requirement, as the book's introduction points out). Ginsberg utilizes as much jazz imagery and phrasing as do other Beat poets such as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Kerouac, whose work is here. Also, there is none of the poetry from the Last Poets; Raymond Patterson, author of Elemental Blues; Eugene Redmond, poet and editor of Drumvoices Revue; or jazz saxophonist/ poet Archie Shepp. The fact is, so many poets have been influenced by jazz that ten books easily could be assembled with the same title and with different poets each time. Perhaps this book might have been more appropriately called A Jazz Poetry Anthology, the indefinite article being more well-suited for this impressionistic and unsettled class of poetry.

Many of the poets included have performed closely and impressively with jazz. These include Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Amizi Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. The emphasis, however, is not on the poem in performance, but on those poets who, according to the editors, "have tried to write about the music and to keep the musical rhythms without relying on a live combo to set the pulse." As the book goes back to the period of jazz's early roots, 'the poems allow for a special reading of jazz history ... to see the different musical stages through their respective poetic treatments."

In addition to certain touchstone figures, some from the list above, who are essential to any history of the jazz-poetry connection, there are many other contemporary poets who contribute to the sense of what a jazz poem might be. Hayden Carruth, poet and author of Sitting In: Selected Writings on jazz, the Blues and Related Topics, is represented here by four sections from his finely structured yet casually associative "Paragraphs." William Matthews' selections include elegies to Coltrane, Bud Powell, and Coleman Hawkins; a fourth poem, "Listening to Lester Young," turns elegiac by the end. In his engaging "Alice Zeno Talking, and Her Son George Lewis the Jazz Clarinetist in Attendance," the aged Alice speaks in italics, and the narrator, with the gentle sympathy of a shared vision, comments on her life as it is revealed during an interview with folklorists:

They're trying

to link her to a theory of the past.

Creole? Creole born from here.

Silence. They can be heard riffing

for a next question, and it's about

a song to which she knows arid recites

the words. Her voice is low as usual.

Her son's trumpeter for years, Kid

Howard, seldom played above the

staff--

that was George-domain up there,

and George wound his loops and kerf